Comment 52 for bug 204996

I think you're on to something, that it's disk-access related somehow.

There's a few reports of screwed-up swapfile access from some of our brethren afflicted :). That may be tied to how much memory we have - I'm running 1.5gig and hence I'm not hitting swap. But if I was, screwball disk access could show up as a swapfile issue.

Huh.

In better news, I've been throwing more and more stuff at mine trying to get it to puke under the -rt kernel. No "luck" so far, which is good...this may be a sound alternative to a kernel recompile.

The pieces I added in Synaptic were:

linux-headers-2.6.24-16-rt (needed if you're a Virtualbox user or otherwise have to compile kernel modules!)

linux-headers-rt (possibly same boat as above)

linux-image-2.6.24-16-rt

linux-image-rt

linux-restricted-modules-2.6.24-16-rt

linux-restricted-modules-rt

I also edited grub:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

In there, I recommending making a couple of changes, as so:

---
## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout 20

## hiddenmenu
# Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
#hiddenmenu
---

Commenting "hiddenmenu" (default is active) makes your system pick from the kernel list on each boot, while increasing the "timeout" number gives you more time to pick.

This is just while you're testing various kernels. I have server, rt, 386 and generic. Server so far has been a failure, haven't played with "386" but I don't have high hopes. It's -rt that's the big change that with luck isn't going to crash on me...I've got about four hours use on it so far. Fingers crossed it stays blow-up free. Seems stable in all other respects.